In lessons 1 through 4, you learned some greetings and how to read, write, and pronounce Persian words.

In this lesson, you will learn about Persian verbs: their agreement with the subject, their location in a sentence, and how to conjugate the most common one, بودن ‹budan› (“to be”), in the simple present tense.

In both English and Persian, sentences have subjects and verbs. In a sentence that expresses an action, the subject is usually the main actor or agent. In a sentence that makes a comment about a topic, the subject is usually that topic. A verb is a word like talk that expresses an action, or one like is that links the subject to the words that comment about it:

Persian verbs are conjugated by adding suffixes, similar to the way English verbs like talk take the suffixes -s, -ed, and -ing to make verb forms like talks, talked, and talking. In Persian, though, the verb’s suffix clearly indicates its grammatical person and number. For example, the table on the right shows the simple present tense “full” forms of the Persian verb بودن ‹budan› (“to be”), consisting of the stem هست‍ ‹hast-› and various suffixes to indicate the person and number:

Conjugation

Say each of the personal pronouns from the table above. While saying each one, imagine and point to the people to whom the pronoun might refer. For example, while saying ما ‹mâ› (“we, us”), imagine another person next to you and point to that person and yourself.

Repeat the personal pronouns as above, but after each one, say the corresponding simple present tense full forms of بودن ‹budan› from the table above. For example, when saying شما ‹šomâ› (“you (plural)”), point to two imaginary addressees and then say هستید ‹hastin› .[3]

The full simple present tense of بودن ‹budan› appeared as هستید ‹hastin› and هستم ‹hastam› in the first and third lines of the dialogue above.

بودن ‹budan› also appears in abbreviated form above, once as the word است ‹e› [3] and once as the suffix ‍م ‹-am› following ایرانی ‹irâniy› (“Iranian”). That's because the verb بودن ‹budan› has both a full form using the stem هست‍ ‹hast-› and a short form. The long form is a bit more formal in tone and often carries the sense of “exists”.

The short form is used more often than the long form, especially in casual speech. As shown below, most of the short form is written as suffixes (technically clitics since they attach to phrases rather than just words) like ‍ید ‹-in› [3] in چطورید ‹cetorin› (“how are you”), but the third person singular form is written as a separate word: است ‹e› (“is”)[3]:

است ‹ast› can be used with singular or plural subjects to express existence, like "there is" or "there are" in English.

For plural “animate” subjects (one that refers to multiple people or to a thing that might be thought to behave figuratively like multiple people), existence can also be expressed with the plural form هستند ‹hastan› .

Some sources disagree with this and say است is only used as a copula, never used for existence.

Colloquially, هستند ‹hastand› may be a suffix pronounced ‹an› after consonant or ‹n› after vowel.

As the previous dialogues have shown, the verb usually comes last in a simple Persian sentence. For example, the last word in each Persian sentence below is a form of the verb بودن ‹budan› (“to be”):

“I am fine.”

من خوب هستم.

من

خوب

هستم

←

‹man›

‹xub›

‹hastam›

←

“I”

“fine”

“am”

“You are a student.”

تو دانشجو هستی.

تو

دانشجو

هستی

←

‹to›

‹danešju›

‹hasti›

←

“you”

“student”

“are”

“The university is big.”

دانشگاه بزرگ است.

دانشگاه

بزرگ

است

←

‹dânešgâh›

‹bozorg›

‹e›

←

“university”

“big”

“is”

Grammatically, subjects are optional in Persian. Since the suffix of a conjugated verb clearly indicates the number and person of the subject, subject pronouns are often omitted from Persian sentences, except when used for emphasis.

↑The word “you” does not usually appear in English commands, but the grammatical subject “you” is implied.

↑ abThe grammatical number may be different from the semantic number. E.g., in “These scissors are dull”, the subject and verb are grammatically plural but semantically indicate a single item. In Persian, there are similar constructions, and both plural pronouns and plural verb forms are often used as a polite version of the singular. More about this will be explained in later lessons.

↑ abcdefghiNote: The Persian script here uses formal spelling, but the transcriptions in angle brackets shows typical colloquial pronunciation. In colloquial speech, for example, the ending ‍ید ‹-id› is often pronounced as ‹-in› and the word است ‹ast› (“is”) is pronounced as ‹e› after a consonant or as ‹s› after a vowel. Other differences between spoken and written Persian will be given in the lessons that follow.